The use of mobile devices in general, and smartphones as well as tablet computers in particular, such as Apple's iPAD®, Apple's iPhone®, and Google's Android based smartphones and tablet computers, is increasing significantly. These mobile devices have become in many cases a primary replacement to other computing devices allowing access to data by the mobile device to a variety of applications in general, and in particular to electronic mail (e-mail) applications. The receipt of data by the mobile device typically requires the use of wireless bandwidth. Mobile devices typically utilize wireless bandwidth through a wireless local area network (WLAN) or the cellular network. The data connectivity through the cellular network, unlike the wired and WLAN counterpart, tends to be pricey, especially when the user is outside of the boundaries of a given data pricing package.
Standard ways to reduce the amounts of data sent to and from the mobile device include a plurality of well-known compression techniques. However, such techniques are limited and further data reduction may be required. This is particularly true with respect to data provided by e-mail applications where it has become customary to attach documents, pictures, video clips, and the like which increase significantly the size of an e-mail message. In many cases, the user does not desire to receive all this data. A common technique to reduce the amount of data is not to send an e-mail message that is over a particular size to the mobile device, but to instead send only certain portions thereof, and allow the user to request the download of the rest of the e-mail message on-demand. The threshold is typically a built-in function on the mobile application and therefore operates automatically, providing certain additional bandwidth savings.
An exemplary protocol that is now widely used for the purpose of such synchronization of a mobile device is the Microsoft ActiveSync® standard. However, this standard does not define the kinds of compression or handling of data to reduce the amount of data provided to the mobile device. This decision is typically built-in by the application in general, and the e-mail application in particular executed over the mobile device. In a typical application, such as the e-mail on Apple's iPhone, two separate types of decisions are made by the e-mail application. One has to do with the size of the text in rich or simple format and the other with handling attachments to the e-mail. The decision is made on a per e-mail basis, and therefore it is often the case that unwanted data is automatically downloaded to the mobile device, increasing the use cost unnecessarily.
It would be advantageous to provide a solution that overcomes the limitations of currently available applications for mobile devices. It would be further advantageous if the solution would not require the use of a dedicated client running on the mobile device.